Thread by @the_ayeminthant

With stories like this, so much gets left out of the final publication. This is a 🧵of some of the wild things said by Marc LeQuieu that were left out of this story, in part to avoid making him out to be a fool and that shouldn't have been the focus of it.
newnaratif.com/dr-sasa-visits…

I made this thread since many have raised questions about what exactly LeQuieu said in these meetings that was so questionable that it warranted a whole article (which can now be read in Burmese as well). newnaratif.com/my/dr-sasa-vis…

I stand by the final story, but it also leaves out just how bad some of LeQuieu’s advice was. This ranges from stuff that was factually incorrect to stuff that was not useful in the Myanmar context. The article also leaves out just how little he seems to know about Myanmar.

In the first meeting I attended, LeQuieu said people could disable military vehicles by pouring sugar into the gas tank. I researched this. It's a myth, and that’s when I began to be suspicious of this supposedly highly experienced former operative. motorbiscuit.com/fact-vs-myth-w…

Later, he advised people to sabotage vehicles by putting potatoes in their tailpipes - another myth and a potentially deadly one. If people took this advice seriously, they would be risking their lives to carry out missions that were doomed from the start

To be fair, he did give some good advice, especially around how protestors could stay safe during the protests by understanding how much protection their gear actually provided and how to find cover from gunfire.

But a lot of the advice was also functionally useless, like him advising people to use bathtubs to shelter from projectiles when they are in their homes. Maybe that would offer some protection in that situation, but the average home in Myanmar doesn’t have a bathtub.

LeQuieu also seemed to lack basic knowledge about Myanmar. He said in May that one of the goals of these meetings was to help urban groups win enough victories to “convince someone that is in a safe place, in the mountain regions and the periphery, to get involved physically”.

You know that famously safe Myanmar periphery where genocides take place, hundreds of thousands of people were in IDP camps even before the coup, and where war has been waged against ethnic minority groups for 70 years.

And while I don’t expect the average foreigner to get the pronunciation right, it did really grate on me personally that months into these meetings, LeQuieu was still calling people Burmi, Burmanese, and Myanmarese.

In one meeting, he even posited: “Somebody is going to have to figure out who in the French political realm is backing this dictator, and why? Is it the French royal family? Somebody needs to start getting real research into the French-Myanmarian connection.”

When he as interviewed by me, Lequieu said that he used to get information from “Central Intelligence Agencies and things like that”, so I would have assumed someone like that would know that the French royal family were overthrown largely killed over 200 years ago.

He also kept insisting that there was going to be a Chinese invasion very soon when “your general requested security forces”, not seeming to know that the Tatmadaw’s whole thing is being paranoid about foreign invasion. There’s a lot more in my notes, but I’ll stop here for now.

So beyond the issue of what kind of violence should be acceptable, which ended up being the focus of the article, all of this was also dangerous because people in these meetings appeared to take this man who said all these things so seriously.

When I first started reporting on this, Dr. Sasa and the PDFs honestly weren’t a part of the picture. I just saw someone giving frequently incorrect and potentially dangerous advice to protestors who were told he was a seasoned expert who had been in conflicts all over the world.